Bees are great. They’re amazing animals. I’ve been interested in them for a few years now. I first started paying attention to them more back when I was writing a lot of fiction, I used bees as a metaphor in a few things. Then I decided to start doing some research on them, and it turned out I chose a great animal. Bees are some of the most complex, highly evolved creatures on Earth.

In any case, they’ve come up twice in some cool stuff I’ve been looking at lately. Firstly, I caught this PBS special on colony collapse disorder one night by chance. Colony collapse disorder has apiologists (bee researchers) scared, as it (whatever it is) is killing whole colonies of bees in the US and increasingly throughout the world.

Scientists don’t know yet exactly what’s happening to the bees yet either. They just don’t come back to the hive and die.

Silence of the Bees, though, shown in full on PBS.org, explains a lot about what’s happening and where research is now on it. It’s not as dry as some PBS specials, I recommend giving it a look.

Secondly, Newsweek has a pretty interesting, short article on Parisian bees and all the cool pollen they come up with.

Testers have been surprised to find equatorial pollens from palm trees in [Paris beekeper] Darné’s honey pots. There’s evidence of a pollen that looks to be from the family of the baobab tree, the whimsical African colossus. “There aren’t any baobabs in the Greater Paris area, that’s for sure,” Darné says. Some pollens linger unidentified while researchers trade pollen photos over the Internet with colleagues in New Zealand and Madagascar. Olive tree, eucalyptus, the South African gazania flower, even cannabis is traceable in Seine-St-Denis hives, according to Yves Loublier, a pollen specialist with the French National Center for Scientific Research.